The Arab Spring Created A Bunch Of Mini Irans

Six months ago, when Algerian writer Boualem Sansal was awarded
the Frankfurt Book Fair's top honor, the Peace Prize, he was,
like many previous winners — Susan Sontag, Orhan Pamuk and Vaclav
Havel among them — an author and a cultural icon of great renown.

Nevertheless, the prize came to him at an awkward juncture. While
he is one of a small clutch of intellectuals whose calls for
freedom inspired the insurrections that have flamed across the
Arab world during the past year, he is also one of the revolt's
most public targets. Widely popular in France and in Germany, his
books are banned in Algeria.

"The Arab Spring has failed completely," Sansal said in an
interview with GlobalPost. "It is a catastrophe that only the
Islamists will be able to take advantage of."

As retribution for accepting an invitation to the Jerusalem
Writer's Festival held this week, the Algerian government
threatened Sansal with 20 years in jail. During a Paris stop-over
on his way to Israel, he mentioned this decree to his editors at
Gallimard. He asked them to hold off on any petitions until (and
if) he is actually detained.

Perhaps the perceived threat posed by Sansal, who is a
soft-spoken man of 62, is heightened by the fact that he is a
quintessentially Algerian figure. Born into a secular and
cosmopolitan French-speaking family, he has lived in his country
of birth since birth. He bears a single passport. For much of his
career as an engineer and an economist he worked for the national
oil industry and, later, as a high-level public servant in the
Ministry of Industry.

"I have numerous enemies," he said, cracking a smile. "I have
always hated the purpose to which people use Islam as a weapon of
war. I have always hated the cheap anti-occidental discourse of
Islamism. They accuse me of being an enemy of Islamisation, but
how can you be the enemy of something you don't recognize?"

His work, from the first novel published when he was 50, has
consciously yet subtly argued against an hermetic, fanatical
worldview.

So far, only his prize-winning penultimate novel has been
translated into English. Published in the United States as The
German Mujahid and in the UK as An Unfinished Business, it is a
doozy — explicitly equating radical Islam and Nazism.

The story is based on an experience Sansal had as a young
engineer, when he came across a remote Algerian village with
impeccably manicured flowerbeds, neatly asphalted roads and
squat, square houses with slanting roofs. Upon investigation he
discovered that the town's mayor, a military man and a hero of
Algerian independence, was in fact a Nazi fugitive.

It is in this crucible — who is perceived to be a hero versus who
is seen as the incarnation of evil, and how can humanity survive
if they turn out to be the same man — that the tender book
unfolds.

In an interview with the Jewish Chronicle, Sansal compared
Jihadis and Nazis: "There are enormous similarities — the concept
of conquering: of souls, but also of territories. And there is
the idea of extermination — of all those who do not submit to the
ideology of Islamism. I believe we have to analyze National
Socialism if we are to keep Islamism in check."

"We are not condemned to a life sentence in jail," Sansal said
about his fellow Arabs. "We can be free men."

Sansal cuts a sleek, elegant ferret-like figure. He appears
entirely unassuming in a well-tailored burgundy jacket, dark blue
shirt and corresponding tie, with a tidy grey ponytail winding
its way down his back. At once intensely present and discreet,
bearing a remarkably open countenance, he appears to observe the
world with vigilant, wary eyes.

Lately he has come to define himself as an “internal exile.” He
and his wife, Naziha, a professor of mathematics, live in a
remote university town encircled by a wall and barbed wire. His
wife and her sisters, he said, "are among the bravest people I
know" because they dare to leave their homes in regular Western
attire, without the veil.

His first novel, published in 2000, provoked the loss of his
ministry job and in quick succession his wife's dismissal from
the University of Algiers. He started having trouble renewing his
passport. He was targeted by a propaganda campaign in which he
was described as an enemy of the Arab nation, of Islam, of
traditions, and a lover of the United States, Israel and
perversions. His two daughters, product of a first marriage, live
in Prague.

He defines radical Islam as "the real problem of all Arab
countries."

"For about a decade following independence," he said, "things in
Algeria were normal. Then they started with a process of
nationalism, Islamisation, Arabisation and abandoned progression,
development, secularity and all the problems began."

Secularism, Sansal argues, "only has meaning in a democracy.
Under any dictatorship, it has no meaning."

In his view, Syria is just another example of government by
diktat. Sansal calls upon Western powers to intervene in Syria,
and issue an arrest warrant for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his generals.

"We shouldn't have to wait until the entire country has been
massacred for someone to act," he said. "At the same time, the
people of Syria should not give up. They must continue to
struggle. If they are defeated now, it will be 20 years before we
even know who was killed, who was disappeared and who was
arrested."

The Arab Spring initially filled Sansal with great optimism
before it curdled into an unfortunate feeling of déjà vu: more of
the same or, as it is popular to say in Algeria these days, plus
ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

"They are demanding the departure of one dictator only to
exchange him for another. A revolution has to be against the
ideas that brought about the dictatorship, not against an
individual. It has to be for ideals, for freedom, for
rationalism."

In Algeria, he said, "People have now freely voted for a
dictatorship, which will be worse than the one that came before
it."

"We are creating numerous small Irans, little theocracies."

His great fear for the coming years is that the newly defined
nations will form "a new Arab League based on a religion. It
would be a very dangerous thing."

Having left Israel, Sansal published an
article in the Huffington Post entitled, "I went to
Jerusalem... and I returned enriched and happy."

Addressing himself to his "dear brothers, dear friends, in
Algeria, in Palestine in Israel and elsewhere," Sansal writes:

"I will speak to you about Israel and the Israelis as one sees
them with one's own eyes, on location, with no intermediaries,
far from any doctrine... The fact is that in this world, there is
no other country and no other people like them. As for me, it
reassures me and fascinates me that we are all unique. And while
the unique is irritating, we are borne to cherish it because
losing it would be completely unremmediable."